"Year five? That's when the pain stopped feeling like pain. It just became... part of the rhythm."
– Dante
---
Evermont didn't feel like a mountain anymore. It felt like a battlefield where time stood still—and sometimes, broke entirely.
The year started with silence. The Trickster was gone—vanished without a trace. No echo. No prank. Not even a whisper. Dante didn't say much about it. He just trained harder. Alone.
The Sound God stayed, creating twisted trials like the Resonance Gauntlet, a warped sound-dimension where Dante fought using echoes instead of sight. Blindfolded, battered, bleeding, he learned to predict motion before it happened. By the time he escaped it, he could move faster than thought and hit like thunder.
But the real test came when the gods sent something worse than noise—a blade that couldn't be touched.
It didn't cut flesh. It unwrote it. Every time Dante blocked or struck it, the damage grew worse, like time was folding over the wound. He couldn't heal it—not with the life energy the Trickster taught him to channel, not with silence, not with rage.
He was dying.
Then, the Trickster returned. Not grinning. Not sarcastic. Just... cold.
"I leave you for one year and this is what I come back to? Bleeding on my favorite mountain? Pathetic."
Dante, weak and half-conscious, muttered, "Can't heal it…"
"No. You can't. So you're going to learn something else," the Trickster said. "We're going to teach you to rewind it."
---
Time-Scar Training. That's what Dante called it.
The process? Devastating. The Trickster repeatedly inflicted injuries that couldn't be healed. Then, he forced Dante to relive them—rewinding time on his own body by focusing on the moment before the damage.
Every second of success came with hours of agony. If Dante rewound too far, his muscles broke from the regression. If he didn't go far enough, the pain stayed. If he did it perfectly? The injury vanished—and the attacker felt it instead.
A passive defense born of suffering. Damage reversal as a reflex.
"Oh, and the best part?" the Trickster said once, casually tossing another cursed dagger. "It only works if the wound really means to kill you."
"You're insane," Dante spat.
"Welcome to the family."
---
By the end of the year, Dante could reverse almost any injury. The sword that once devoured flesh? Now it was a liability for its wielder. The gods were starting to fear him—but they hadn't seen what came next.
The cold was nothing now. Time bent when Dante needed it to. His heartbeat had rhythm, resonance, retaliation.
Year Five didn't teach Dante how to live.
It taught him how to survive the impossible—and send the pain back where it came from.